Rick Hill is the Valero Alamo Bowl’s VP of Marketing and Communications. Prior to the bowl, Rick spent 6 years working for the Spurs, one season with Missions Baseball and two fruitless months trying to sell season tickets for the S.A. Riders.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Officially A Significant Mess

The Valero Alamo Bowl is rolling out a number of new initiatives as part of our 20th Anniversary celebration. The one that I may enjoy the most but affected the smallest number of people was our inaugural Bowl Intern Reunion.

Since our inception in 1993, we’ve had 48 full-time interns and 16 of them joined our staff to spend last weekend in Austin. Many already knew each other from coming back to volunteer for Bowl Week after their internships ended. The ones that hadn’t met yet had the same comment I did when surveying the group: “Wow, we do a good job of hiring quality people.”

Since we did more storytelling, eating, paddle boating and gorilla dancing (don’t ask) than football watching, I hoped Twitter could help me with story ideas for this week’s blog.

Bad idea. Thanks to the NFL’s decision to use replacement referees all the talk was about blown calls and that was before the Monday Night Football debacle that cost the Packers a win.

I know there are two sides to all labor dispute,s but when the integrity of your league is being questioned and not a single media entity is on your side (see today’s San Antonio Express-News sports headline: “Officially a significant mess”) you have to step back and rationally access your position.

The feeding frenzy has a new damaging story coming out one after another. This morning Twitter was abuzz with the revelation that one of the officials that wrongly signaled touchdown in the Monday Night Football game was deemed “not ready to officiate at the Division I level” at a recent football officials conference.

The NFL earns $10 billion a year in revenue, a figure NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wants to grow to $20 billion in the next decade. According to the Wall Street Journal, the current fight is over $3 million which breaks down to about $6,000 per game, per team over the life of the agreement.

I’d assume the NFL will make a deal this week, but I’m not worried as I won’t have to rely on my Twitter feed for information. I’ll be home and there are a number of college games I want to watch beginning to end.

In the Big 12, the two most interesting contests are Baylor at West Virginia and Texas at Oklahoma State. Baylor has an amazing streak of seven straight games where they have scored 45+points and will probably need that to continue if they are to win on the road against Heisman front runner Geno Smith and the Mountaineers.

In Stillwater, unranked Oklahoma State was the favorite against #12 Texas earlier this week, but most media outlets are now giving a slight edge to Texas. Clearly these two teams are closer than their rankings indicate and should again provide plenty of offensive firepower when they face off as they have in past match-ups.

The two Pac-12 games I want to see the most are Stanford at Washington and Oregon State at Arizona. Stanford’s win against USC proved the cupboard wasn’t bare when Andrew Luck left for the NFL. LSU crushed Washington, but if history is any indication Coach Sark will have used UW’s off-week wisely and have them ready for tomorrow night’s ESPN game.

Oregon, Stanford and USC are currently the Big Three in the Pac-12. Oregon State will have a chance to move into that #4 slot with a win against Arizona who is looking to rebound after their loss to the Ducks.

There’s a 60% chance of rain so settle in for what should be a good weekend to plant yourself on the couch. And if rain doesn’t come I know there’s 100% chance people will keep piling on the NFL if they don’t get the deal done. Please NFL, stop this mess before we are subjected to another week of bad calls and “Call it Maybe” parodies.